tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.comments2018-05-08T23:43:16.543+01:00Notes from Two Scientific PsychologistsAndrew Wilsonhttps://plus.google.com/100841335754826929747noreply@blogger.comBlogger2206125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-61373147255115066912018-05-08T23:43:16.543+01:002018-05-08T23:43:16.543+01:00Cool! *sticks in a folder called VR Position Paper...Cool! *sticks in a folder called VR Position Paper for later consumption* :)Andrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-37089682839044661612018-05-02T15:45:07.705+01:002018-05-02T15:45:07.705+01:00Nice. I&#39;ve been working on a similar idea with...Nice. I&#39;ve been working on a similar idea with affordances and presence, and place. The gist is that affordances define place in a Gibsonian sense, and a place rich with affordances enables presence. As applied to VR, it would suggest that what makes a virtual place a place would be affordances. First pass at it is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315857714_A_Place_for_James_J_Gibson<br />Flach and Holden&#39;s paper The Reality of Experience: Gibson&#39;s Way, gets at this too. Dan McConnellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02053152464357304832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-30751850483163125902018-04-30T14:10:35.278+01:002018-04-30T14:10:35.278+01:00I really enjoy reading your blog. Let&#39;s see wh...I really enjoy reading your blog. Let&#39;s see what the future of VR will bring, maybe even for interacting in VR with patients.Psychologisthttps://psychotherapie-hughes.denoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-17008948549766160672018-04-10T07:11:33.955+01:002018-04-10T07:11:33.955+01:00Hi great article! Just wondering what your positio...Hi great article! Just wondering what your position would be on the claim &quot;infants are cognitively competent&quot;. <br />On one hand the &quot;super baby&quot; research seems to indicate that babies are able to discriminate monkey faces, phonemes, and &quot;impossible&quot; events at the same level or better than adults. But is this just the result of poorly designed research. If it is, are there any examples of research indicating infants are cognitively competent above just being able to distinguish items. <br />Thanks!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-3851809254639928582018-03-15T12:42:35.803+00:002018-03-15T12:42:35.803+00:00I wouldn&#39;t want to commit these guys to anythi...I wouldn&#39;t want to commit these guys to anything but I think yes, it&#39;s all in the same ballparkAndrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-53902698618463616482018-03-09T01:06:51.034+00:002018-03-09T01:06:51.034+00:00Nice article! Quick question.
Suppose the positio...Nice article! Quick question.<br /><br />Suppose the position variable of the raw signal was composed of two axes (or more - coordinations don&#39;t happen along one axis) might the same signal processing technique outlined above be implemented? Or would the addition of a second position axis at the raw signal fundamentally break the &quot;phase&quot; approach?<br /><br />If you can&#39;t answer it that&#39;s cool! You might be able to answer if having a 2nd position axis is even all that important to your approach. If so, why not?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-60278825075040404292018-03-06T14:22:49.397+00:002018-03-06T14:22:49.397+00:00I haven&#39;t read the BC&amp;R paper (but I&#39;v...I haven&#39;t read the BC&amp;R paper (but I&#39;ve put it on the list!) but what you&#39;ve pulled from it sounds vaguely Brunswikian. Would you consider that an accurate assessment?Dan McConnellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02053152464357304832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-39933319124874372972018-01-19T18:23:06.712+00:002018-01-19T18:23:06.712+00:00Both the original paper [Kareklas, Nettle &amp; Sm...Both the original paper [Kareklas, Nettle &amp; Smulders (2013)] and the disconfirming paper mentioned in the third edit [(Julia Haseleu et al (2014)] make use of small, light objects which may not require much friction to manipulate.<br /><br />The followup I would be interested in would involve larger and heavier objects which are relatively more dependent on friction versus mechanical entrapment. Something like, say, an American football (inspired by Eric Charles&#39; comment).<br /><br />The Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05511104756802763545noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-50610318030011569922018-01-18T18:09:28.655+00:002018-01-18T18:09:28.655+00:00Hi, I&#39;m a brazillian Behavior Analyst. I did m...Hi, I&#39;m a brazillian Behavior Analyst. I did my master&#39;s and doctoral research based on behavioral analitic methods and Skinner&#39;s theoretical umbrella, the Radical Behaviorism. Actually, when you names the current Behavior Analisys theory of Behaviorism it&#39;s a half true. First, becouse the Skinnerian theory is far more broader scope that Watsonian Classical Behaviorim was. And second, becouse there are inumerous behavioristic theories. But, none with so many coomon points with embodied cognition and anti-mentalistc view of behavior. <br /><br />I can say for sure that we have a very vibrant community of fellows scientists and practioners. The Applied Behavior Analisys field is one of the most important on autism study and treatment.<br /><br />But, I&#39;m not writing to give a lecture, sorry for the gigantic preambule. I&#39;m writing to ask for help. After read the last Lisa Feldman Barret book about Emotions, and watch her devote part of her theoretical view to Lawrence Barselou, I got very curious about this branch of Cognitive Science, the grounded cognition. This lead me to embodied cognition and now I&#39;m here. Mainly becouse, and is this my main point, that Skinner had really antecipated many of the current trends in cognitive science.<br /><br />I read your considerations about it, but I think, that Skinner theory really can help to &quot;find a useful psychological theory&quot;. In order to get you attention I would like to share some interesting papers that can clarify my claim.<br /><br />Please, et me know if you think it&#39;s just mine biased view.<br /><br />Burgos, J. E. (2016). ANTIDUALISM AND ANTIMENTALISM IN RADICAL BEHAVIORISM. Behavior &amp; Philosophy, 43. Recuperado de http://store.behavior.org/httpdocs/resources/915.pdf<br /><br /><br />Chiesa, M. (1992). Radical behaviorism and scientific frameworks: From mechanistic to relational accounts. American Psychologist, 47(11), 1287–1299. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.47.11.1287<br /><br />Overskeid, G. (1995). Cognitivist or behaviourist - Who can tell the difference? The case of implicit and explicit knowledge. British Journal of Psychology, 86(4), 517–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1995.tb02568.x<br /><br /><br />Greenberg, G., &amp; Lambdin, C. (2010). Psychology is a Behavioral Science, Not a Biological Science. A Discussion of the Issue and a Review of Neural Theories of Mind: Why the Mind-Brain Problem May Never be Solved, by William Uttal. The Psychological Record, 57(3). Recuperado de http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/tpr/vol57/iss3/8<br />LeoMarques82https://www.blogger.com/profile/11143729371836626452noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-86831642645280981852017-11-24T17:17:53.432+00:002017-11-24T17:17:53.432+00:00I basically agree. I&#39;m basically on board that...I basically agree. I&#39;m basically on board that it&#39;s a hypothesis worth exploring. But it does make some strong claims about information spaces that need a lot more work to justify. That&#39;s ok though, we had to start somewhere and they were, at the very least, crystal clear at all times about what they were doing. Full points there!Andrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-569975908471076802017-11-23T15:56:10.902+00:002017-11-23T15:56:10.902+00:00I&#39;ve been meaning to respond to this for a whi...I&#39;ve been meaning to respond to this for a while and now I finally have time for a quick question!<br /><br />Why do you place linguistic information at Pole 1 for Specificity? Certainly it&#39;s specific to the dynamics of vocal articulation, but linguistic info isn&#39;t About that, unless you&#39;re a baby first learning to speak. As you pointed out, my using the word &quot;dog&quot; is not specific to me having perceived a dog that is present, even if it&#39;s About one. And if I&#39;ve let down my friend Mark and he says &quot;it&#39;s fine,&quot; his words are not specific to him actually being fine or to him being upset, even though his words are About his mental state. It seems like Aboutness should affect classification along the Specificity axis.Gabriel Brintonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10665395294882279364noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-25688920276581833082017-11-22T21:05:43.152+00:002017-11-22T21:05:43.152+00:00I had very mixed feelings about the Direct Learnin...I had very mixed feelings about the Direct Learning thing for a while. Then, at a meeting, I saw Michaels give a talk about it. (2011 in Brazil maybe?) Something clicked, and I have loved the idea since. <br /><br />That is not to say that I am in love with any particular experimental paradigm. <br /><br />Let&#39;s say you believe there is information in the environment that specifies opportunities for behavior, and that organisms can attune to such information over developmental and evolutionary time scales. It follows that in many situations there should exist (in the environment) information that specifies how to correct mistakes in attunement. That is a level more complex, and so it is harder to think about, and harder to set up good experiments about, but it is a solid proposal. <br /><br />I suspect that if Ecological Psychology had a much wider net of successes on the first order (perception of affordances), it would be easier to find ideal opportunities for exploring that second order (perception of how to correct affordance-perception errors). As it is, the rod-weilding work is one of the few super-well-explored paradigms, and I think that is the main justification for using it in the initial test. The results, while not perfect, seem good enough to justify much future work. Eric Charleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17412168482569793996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-1730831580756512392017-11-07T10:57:43.791+00:002017-11-07T10:57:43.791+00:00Hi Drew
The mechanistic approach is primarily abo...Hi Drew<br /><br />The mechanistic approach is primarily about not modelling anything until you have independent empirical evidence that the components in your model are, in fact, players in the mechanism under study. Right now the direct learning stuff is effectively model fitting data to a hypothetical description of a continuous space for which there is no independent evidence. Like I say, you have to start somewhere, but that functional analysis won&#39;t get you to mechanism.<br /><br />What I do when I want to identify information being used is a perturbation study (<a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-perturbation-experiment-as-way-to.html" rel="nofollow">post on the general idea</a>, <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/identifying-visual-information-for.html" rel="nofollow">my current specific empirical focus</a>). I run those studies to identify variables and map their characteristics, and only then would I try to build an information space out of them.<br /><br />Now, my current working digging into information for coordination is revealing some complicated findings and I have a lot to do yet to align that work with the direct learning analyses. But long story short, Michaels &amp; Jacobs dive in with some information space and fit data, which is a functional analysis. They should do a ton of work first to identify components, then build the information space out of those and test that directly. It is bloody hard though!Andrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-38584860272136111572017-11-06T18:12:31.904+00:002017-11-06T18:12:31.904+00:00Thanks for reviewing this work and providing your ...Thanks for reviewing this work and providing your assessment. Jeff Wagman and I had some fun applying these ideas to the study of auditory perception of object length. We thought the Michaels et al. explanation of the 1-d information space was sufficient for constructing information spaces and running the analyses ourselves with our own stimuli sets and data. I am in agreement with you that these attempts are good “first swings” and more work and attention is required. I also agree that perhaps the apparent continuous motion of learners through information spaces might be an artifact of the analysis (as communicated in your last post), but of course this ‘movement’ is typically discretized by block in the experimental design and subsequent analytic protocol. In my opinion, this is a limitation of the current analytic protocol, but I think progress could be made if this was innovated. What is your assessment/idea for building information spaces in a more ‘mechanistic, real-parts way’? From your last post, it looked like you were skeptical of implementing (and innovating) an information space analysis but here it looks like you might have thoughts on how to improve it. <br /><br />-Drew Abney<br />drewhamiltonabneyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17193774663425974690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-90173881764268780762017-11-05T16:28:39.519+00:002017-11-05T16:28:39.519+00:00The Direct Learning hypothesis is almost certainly...The Direct Learning hypothesis is almost certainly wrong.<br /><br />The problem that ought to be most obvious to you, is that it is based on the same metaphysical assumptions as is the Representationalism that you reject.<br /><br />I won&#39;t say more at the moment, because you usually disagree with my occasional posts here -- perhaps because I have rejected those metaphysical assumptions.Neil Rickerthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13245981500899410679noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-60962867598588554832017-10-30T08:05:07.816+00:002017-10-30T08:05:07.816+00:00No - PCT is definitely not representational. PCT ...No - PCT is definitely not representational. PCT does not use the old digital computer metaphor. There is only neural signals (firing rates). PCT is realist at it&#39;s core, which I assume is the ecological approach. I do not believe that your can call it cognitive either. It provides a common framework for biological, learning and cognitive approaches. Sean Mulliganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16003255530836914950noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-91212809636083174542017-10-24T11:50:42.517+01:002017-10-24T11:50:42.517+01:00From the point of view of a non expert on the lite...From the point of view of a non expert on the literature but experience of shooting and sons&#39; high level archery and basketball:<br />The key to a release or shot is a prerehersed and preestablished rhythm. Importand very carefully timed stuff goes on for a second or two before the release window.<br /><br />I&#39;d like to see you comment on this 3 min clip from Sundays world archery mens final. 10 ring is 12.2 cm wide, 70m away. It is gusty which affects the flight of the arrow and buffets the archer as he tries to aim. How do the archers compensate in real time, particularly in view of the comments at 1min 50sec: https://youtu.be/nzq_lSBmS9g<br /><br />Robin <br /> Robinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01732833551312628981noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-53139009419355794392017-09-21T09:53:30.178+01:002017-09-21T09:53:30.178+01:00Ha, yes :) I TA&#39;d his undergrad course and sat...Ha, yes :) I TA&#39;d his undergrad course and sat his graduate course, so I got it at least twice :)Andrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11934346644098131385noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-38381132495182764722017-09-20T16:01:57.258+01:002017-09-20T16:01:57.258+01:00Did Bingham ever show you the video he made while ...Did Bingham ever show you the video he made while carrying a video camera down a hallway? It&#39;s another good example of information about something (walking person) in the absence of any image of that something.Dan McConnellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02053152464357304832noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-85980326696521771402017-09-20T15:11:56.972+01:002017-09-20T15:11:56.972+01:00&gt;&gt;This is actually a nice summary of the mis...&gt;&gt;This is actually a nice summary of the mistake standard cognitive science makes, as I see it.<br /><br />Huh, that is not what I was going for. I was thinking about how we should proceed after we feel we have characterized the task correctly. I like the &quot;Ask what your head is inside of&quot; quote, and your arguments in the same vain elsewhere on your blog make a lot of sense; it&#39;s hard to understand what the brain is up to before we understand what it&#39;s up against. As a chemistry major, I also value scientific rigor in the conclusions we draw.<br /><br />And I think I&#39;m beginning to understand what you mean by the information processing ontology as computational cognitive psych conceives of it, and why an alternative is necessary.<br /><br />But say we do have a pretty good understanding of the task and the resources and the information and the etc. Does ecological psych tell us that we shouldn&#39;t study what&#39;s inside your head, even then? That sounds less like a difference in theories or methodologies, and more like a difference in research interests.<br /><br />It seems to me that, whatever it ends up looking like, a viable ecological alternative to the info processing ontology has to support scientists who are interested in studying what the brain is up to. You&#39;ve argued before here that people often misunderstand Gibsonian psych as claiming that the brain isn&#39;t up to anything, and I see how that might be a difficult misperception to surmount. At the same time, talking about &quot;a fielder with their particular dynamics&quot; just begs us to ask what those particular dynamics are, and one thing the information processing ontology is really good for is, it gives us some vocabulary to speculate with. The ecological ontology&#39;s vocabulary so far doesn&#39;t seem to afford brain-up-to-what-speculatability, and I think it needs to, in order to really challenge the dominant ways of doing psychology. After all, speculation is a necessary function of even the most rigorous science. How can we do that without referring to information processing terminology?<br /><br />This has been stimulating a lot of really interesting conversations with my neurosci and psych major friends. As always, thanks for your response!Gabriel Brintonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10665395294882279364noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-69724269194809063002017-09-15T08:05:31.296+01:002017-09-15T08:05:31.296+01:00I also did a follow up study on this weird effect....I also did a follow up study on this weird effect. Not quite the study you suggest (which would also be good to do) - more a attempt to figure out which visual cues were driving the info<br /><br />https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;pid=sites&amp;srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxvYmludGxhYnxneDoxMjZjNjg1NjE3ZTAyY2Q2<br /><br />Got a few more unpublished ones along this lines as well, which mostly point toward the idea that when vision is gone we shift into a safe operating mode where we weight prior experience more heavily. Gavin Buckinghamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08539613027114375642noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-60427294628536364092017-09-03T13:49:58.906+01:002017-09-03T13:49:58.906+01:00OK, one at a time (I&#39;m trying not to rush resp...OK, one at a time (I&#39;m trying not to rush responses while I chew on this :)<br /><br />1. <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009709#s3" rel="nofollow">Lifting without Seeing</a><br /><br />3 identical weight but different sized objects. <br /><br />Condition 1: Lift all objects by a handle under full vision. Visual information about size; haptic information about weight; no haptic information about size.<br />Result: standard SWI + standard adaptation of grip forces to the actual weight.<br /><br />Condition 1: Lift middle object only by a handle after brief view of objects of different size. Visual information about size; haptic information about weight; no haptic information about size.<br />Result: SWI about half strength + NO adaptation of grip forces to the actual weight.<br /><br /><br />Thoughts<br />1. I&#39;m not surprised you got the SWI in both conditions. Size information was only available visually and you had vision in both cases. Perhaps you could vary the strength of the condition 2 effect by varying the viewing time (either amount or proximity to the reach).<br /><br />2. The intriguing result is the lack of fingertip force adaptation. This, as you note, means fingertip forces are not being corrected simply by haptics. I agree with your paper that it would interesting to track the dynamics with an extended study, more trials, see if it ever happened. As with (1) it&#39;s clear &quot;amount/timing of visual information&quot; is playing an interesting role.<br /><br />One way to read Figure 1 is that relative to the full vision condition, the no-vision lifts kept a higher lift force and a slower rate of force change. Both are conservative strategic moves, as you note. What is the &#39;correct&#39; lift force and lift force rate? The assumption seems to be the full vision lifts of the middle sized object are the correct ones. But where should they be, in order to safely lift the object?<br /><br />Interesting study!Andrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-8930462569496060062017-09-03T12:53:37.972+01:002017-09-03T12:53:37.972+01:00Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that any math...Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that any mathematically described reality is incomplete. Hoffman et al’s unseen reality is (will be, when he’s described it mathematically) incomplete. The bit that will be missing in Hoffman’s account will be Russell’s - the perceptually described, or better, measured, reality, which is measured as “invariant across group actions” (though scaled differently by different bodies).<br /> <br />Perceptually measured reality is great because you can be crap at maths and still do it veridically. Evidently, if you’re good at maths, you may have a bit of trouble, and walk into brick walls from time to time. <br />...<br />A girl walks into a brick wall and cuts her lip open. Greg laughs, while the others run up to help her. <br />“Eh?” She says, eyeing Greg suspiciously. <br />“That’s what happens when you think the interface is real”, says Greg: “It hits you … in der face”! <br />And they all fall through the floor laughing.<br />Rebecca Rhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06066749181601125662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-71803245027526771872017-09-01T08:39:32.113+01:002017-09-01T08:39:32.113+01:00Nice overview – here’s a few things to add which m...Nice overview – here’s a few things to add which may be of interest to the work you’re building toward<br /><br />1. In a paper which goes nicely with Flanagan’s 2008 one, I’ve shown that you can manipulate expectations to affect weight perception from one trial to the next. So give people a peek of something large before lifting, and they will judge it as feel less-heavy than when they get a peek of something small before lifting (size-weight illusion in a single object - Buckingham, G. &amp; Goodale, M.A. (2010). Lifting without seeing: The role of vision in perceiving and acting upon the size-weight illusion. PLoS ONE, 5: e9709. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009709.). Worth noting though that it’s only about half as strong as the full-strength size-weight illusion – perhaps isolating the contribution of expectations to this effect?<br />2. “…with respect to the points above; people come in with some size-weight relations in place - the expectations Flanagan talks about. We aren&#39;t perceiving weight, or size, but size-weight…” This seems intuitive but here is where my view breaks with that of Flanagan because it leads to two natural conclusions: (1) the SWI should vary in strength depending on the expected weight difference of the subsequently-lifted stimuli and (2) the SWI should only be felt within categories of objects (i.e., one of these ‘size-weight mappings’ that Flanagan talks about). But it’s been shown that you have equivalent SWI for big and small chunks of metal (which the lifter should expect to be v. different weights’ as you do for big and small chunks of polystyrene (which the lifter should expect to be very similar in weight) [Buckingham, G., &amp; Goodale, M.A. (2013). Size matters: A single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion. PLoS ONE, 8: e54709. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054709.]. You also have a whopping big SWI across object categories – golf balls feel heavier than identically-weighted beach balls, even though you would expect the former to be heavier than the latter [Buckingham, G., &amp; MacDonald, A. (2016). Weight of expectation: A size-weight illusion without contrasting prior expectations of heaviness. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 1831-1841. ]. My thought laid out in the review article is that the SWI reflects a single (presumably the mean) size-weight mapping of all stuff you interact with (your forces, by contrast, get access to all these nice discrete ‘smart’ categories). But other than saying this is a perceptual shortcut, it really muddies the ‘why’ of the SWI. Any ideas…?<br />3. There’s a third view about the cause of the SWI which is that it’s something to do with density. This has always been a bit vague, but a few nice recent papers have formalized this a bit. Megan Peters makes a pretty compelling case that the illusion is a consequence of how we combine expected density with size [Peters, M.A.K., Ma, W.J., &amp; Shams, L. (2016). The Size-Weight Illusion is not anti-Bayesian after all: A unifying quantitative Bayesian account. PeerJ 4:e2124 doi:10.7717/peerj.2124.], based on some nice environmental statistics work showing that, on average, smaller things are actually denser than larger things in our environment [Peters, M.A.K., Balzer, J., &amp; Shams, L. (2015). Smaller = denser, and the brain knows it: Natural statistics of object density shape weight expectations. PLoS ONE 10(3), e0119794.]. I’ve seen similar work at a conference showing that this sort of Bayesian combination of size information and density can explain the 2008 inverted size-weight illusion result as well. But it’s completely agnostic to the material weight illusion etc and also isn’t obviously action driven.Gavin Buckinghamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08539613027114375642noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-71095185606824502992017-08-31T15:28:25.208+01:002017-08-31T15:28:25.208+01:00spatiotemporal dynamics occurring outside the brai...<i>spatiotemporal dynamics occurring outside the brain are actually included in what we call &quot;cognition.&quot; Is that characterization correct?</i><br />Yes. Nicely put. <br /><br /><i>Part of the reason I made that distinction between the action and the behavior was to cut away the spatiotemporal stuff look as narrowly as possible at what the brain in particular is up to, because that&#39;s the part of the outfielder&#39;s ecological strategy that we still don&#39;t understand. And just seeing that lack of resemblance between perception and action, at a first impression, was enough to make me go, &quot;Huh, well something ~transformative~ is obviously happening here.&quot; Do you agree with that?</i><br />This is actually a nice summary of the mistake standard cognitive science makes, as I see it. You cannot understand the brain without knowing about the perception-action stuff, and when you try, all you see is a huge gap between sensation and motor control that has to be filled somehow. Once you start looking at ecological information, you see it&#39;s structure in behaviour (coordination dynamics, outfielding, etc) and also in the brain (van der Meer&#39;s stuff). So yes, I think this move is likely the source of the intuition - but it&#39;s a bad move, ecologically.<br /><br /><i>The transformations are those that make the optical array resemble a motor signal, and they&#39;re required because it doesn&#39;t already resemble one. What particular transformations they are strikes me as a research question. </i><br />So there may not be transformations that have to be implemented. For example, a running outfielder might just be what you get when you couple a fielder with their particular dynamics to that information variable. See <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/brains-dont-have-to-be-computers-purple.html" rel="nofollow">this post</a> for more on what I mean here. <br /><br /><i>the concept of transformations may also have some baggage that causes you to eschew the term. What might that baggage be?</i><br />The primary baggage is that the concept lives in one ontology (theory about the nature of the world; here, the informational processing ontology) and may simply be an error, if the ecological ontology is more accurate. It is not a necessary feature of cognition; it&#39;s something that&#39;s only required if signals require active transforming, rather than the more dynamical view in the post I linked above.Andrew Wilsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.com